Gandhi Before India by Ramachandra Guha; Penguin India; Price: Rs.899; 673 pp Arguably contemporary India™s most eminent historian who has sparked a renaissance in the study of history in the subcontinent, Ramachandra Guha is evidently certain that Mohandas Karamchand (aka Mahatma) Gandhi™s enlightened ideals continue to inspire people to fight against injustice and promote world peace. Nobel laureates Barack Obama, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Martin Luther King Jr. have publicly confessed to having learnt their political lessons and skills of resisting unjust authority from the Mahatma. Yet the starting point of this first of a two-volume biography is Gandhi™s œless known and sometimes forgotten years in Porbandar, Rajkot, Bombay, London, Durban and Johannesburg, the formative years during which the uncertain, diffident young barrister transformed into a master political strategist, philosopher and saint who began the process of unravelling the mighty British empire. Eschewing the soft option of tracing the early growth of the young Gandhi solely through ˜the prism of his own writings™, Guha draws on hitherto unexplored archives and sources, reports in newspapers of the time ranging from the regional Kathiawar Times of 1888 to local dailies like the Natal Mercury and Johannesburg Star in South Africa, and later international print media such as The Times, London and the New York Times. The biographer™s deep research led him to government intelligence reports and unpublished letters written by Gandhi himself, his friends, family and acquaintances, even his adversaries. This broadening of perspective places Gandhi in transnational contexts outside India ” in heterogeneous societies in Europe and Africa which helped to shape the young Gandhi and profoundly impacted his character and future conduct. The later Gandhi ” crusader for freedom, fearless satyagrahi, prophet of communal harmony ” is reconstructed by Guha through these diasporic experiences, primarily in South Africa where he developed strong and lasting friendships with several strong individuals. Among them: the English radical Henry Polak, a Jew, and his Christian feminist wife, Millie, with whom Gandhi and Kasturba shared a home and learned liberal values and tolerance; Jewish architect Henry Kallenbach who gave Gandhi an opportunity to initiate inter-religious dialogues; Sonja Schlesin, his Russian-Jewish secretary who taught him that women were capable of independent-minded decisions and introduced him to the women™s suffragette movement. In South Africa, Gandhi conducted experiments in community living in Natal™s Phoenix and Tolstoy settlements cutting across boundaries of caste, religion, race and culture. Nevertheless while praising the young Gandhi™s œcapaciousness, Guha doesn™t fudge the issue that during his long and formative sojourn in South Africa, he forged no real professional or personal relationships with the majority community of Africans. Gandhi™s work among the Indian migrants in South Africa built a socially inclusive movement at a time when lives of Indians in India were circumscribed by narrow distinctions of caste and creed. The period of over 20 years after Gandhi first arrived in South Africa as a London-trained barrister with full faith in British justice and institutions, to his evolution…
